JD Finance, a financial service provided by China’s second largest e-commerce platform JD.com, is raising RMB six billion (USD 925 million) in a Series A financing, likely boosting its valuation to RMB 46 billion.
According to an internal JD Finance document disclosed by Tencent Tech on Wednesday, Sequoia Capital is among many investors, and the deal is estimated to be completed in the first quarter of 2016.
This is a bold move for the finance company which has operated independently from JD.com since October 2013.
JD Finance’s biggest rival is Ant Financial, Alibaba’s major Internet finance service, which benefits from a large user base and traffic derived from Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall. Ant Financial now has a valuation as high as USD 45 billion.
Similarly, JD Finance will benefit from JD.com’s large e-commerce operations which see annual transaction volume of several hundred million RMB.
So far, JD Finance has established seven business segments including supply chain finance, consumer finance, crowdfunding, wealth management, payment, insurance and securities.
The obtained document revealed JD Finance sustained a total net loss of RMB 677 million for the first three quarters of 2015.
JD Finance’s total revenue for the first three quarters of 2015 reached RMB 1.258 billion with the document explaining income mainly comes from its payment sector products, JD Pay and JD Wallet.
The CEO of JD Finance, Chen Shengqiang says his team has grown to 3,000 employees as of October 2015 and serves more than 100 million users.
